HIREDIS

It is minimalistic because it just adds minimal support for the protocol, but at the same time it uses a high level printf-alike API in order to make it much higher level than otherwise suggested by its minimal code base and the lack of explicit bindings for every Redis command.

Apart from supporting sending commands and receiving replies, it comes with a reply parser that is decoupled from the I/O layer. It is a stream parser designed for easy reusability, which can for instance be used in higher level language bindings for efficient reply parsing.

Hiredis only supports the binary-safe Redis protocol, so you can use it with any Redis version >= 1.2.0.

The library comes with multiple APIs. There is the synchronous API, the asynchronous API and the reply parsing API.

Upgrading to 1.0.0

Version 1.0.0 marks a stable release of hiredis. It includes some minor breaking changes, mostly to make the exposed API more uniform and self-explanatory. It also bundles the updated sds library, to sync up with upstream and Redis. For most applications a recompile against the new hiredis should be enough. For code changes see the Changelog.

Upgrading from <0.9.0

Version 0.9.0 is a major overhaul of hiredis in every aspect. However, upgrading existing code using hiredis should not be a big pain. The key thing to keep in mind when upgrading is that hiredis >= 0.9.0 uses a redisContext* to keep state, in contrast to the stateless 0.0.1 that only has a file descriptor to work with.

Synchronous API

To consume the synchronous API, there are only a few function calls that need to be introduced: